Twitter goes down, but life goes on

Twitter went down for the count Thursday morning, the victim of a cyberattack that left the microblogging service inaccessible for several hours and deprived countless celebrities of the opportunity to tell the world what they were eating for breakfast. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," read a Twitter corporate blog entry posted shortly before 11 a.m. EDT Thursday. A subsequent update confirmed the site was back online, adding Twitter would "[continue] to defend against and recover from this attack." Twitter junkies freaked out, of course, and posts related to the DOS assault soared to the top of Twitter's most popular topics queue immediately after service--and, some would argue, the cosmic balance--was restored.

The Twitter outage generated headlines in media outlets across the globe--an unthinkable turn of events even a year ago, when subscribers totaled just 2 million, a far cry from today's 30 million users. Recent Nielsen NetView data notes that Twitter is now the fourth most visited social community on the web (behind Facebook, MySpace and Blogger), increasing 1,928 percent year-over-year from one million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21 million unique visitors in June 2009. So it's not surprising that mobile operators and handset makers are increasingly emphasizing Twitter as a selling point: Late last month, AT&T introduced AT&T Social Net, a new mobile application that aggregates tweets, status updates, wall posts and related information from social communities including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace as well as live information feeds from more than 35 news, sports and entertainment sites. Earlier this week, Hutchison Whampoa-owned device maker INQ Mobile unveiled the INQ Chat 3G and the INQ Mini 3G, two new "social phones" featuring an integrated Twitter application developed in close collaboration with the microblogging juggernaut. And even Sprint's new, eco-friendly Samsung Reclaim boasts the carrier's customizable One Click user interface--promising quick access to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube--alongside a host of environmentally themed applications.

The question is whether consumers actually factor social networking functionality into their decision to purchase a new phone, and believe or not, a new Harris Interactive study commissioned by Sprint suggests they do. In fact, 18 percent of young adults ages 18 to 34 say that social media access played a decisive role in their handset purchase. The Harris Interactive study also reports that 25 percent of young adults owning handsets with mobile social networking capabilities access their social media profiles constantly, compared to just 1 percent of consumers ages 55 and older. It's not just younger subscribers, however: A quarter of users between the ages of 35 and 44 also check their social media profiles frequently, some as often as every day. No one knows whether Twittermania will continue--the declining fortunes of MySpace and Friendster suggest otherwise--but to their credit, operators are capitalizing on the fad while it's still peaking, a radical turnabout for an industry once notorious for its lumbering, behind-the-curve approach to new trends and innovations. That's something worth tweeting about. -Jason